Hostess.
Reggie Jackson.
1977.
CHAPTER 24
Office of the Attorney General, Sex Offender Management Bureau
Lower Manhattan
3:26 p.m.
The baseball card was still in the ziplock bag on Joe’s desk, as if somehow keeping it in there would contain its effect. There were a dozen things he wanted to do with it, from clawing it free and sobbing with his face buried in it to burning it, bag and all. There was the fleeting, vague idea of having it “tested” somehow, for something, but that was nonsense.
Stop with the dumb ideas. Think. Where did this come from?
He tried to focus on when he had handled the file last, but that was maddeningly fuzzy. The fact was, he had gotten the case brand new from the Office of Mental Health right before his big hearing on Aaron Hathorne’s case. That was the same week of the fortieth anniversary of the blackout and Lois’s disappearance. The file had traveled with him upstate to the hearing—he figured he’d have time to look it over on the train—then back home, where it eventually made its way to the office. He’d been drunk more than sober during that whole period, though, and couldn’t remember how much he had actually rummaged through it. His eyes crept back over to the baggie again, and he winced. It was a sick irony: he had no idea how this little prize had reappeared in a work folder and yet had the clearest recollection of when he’d last seen it.
She grabbed it after Robbie sent it flying out the window. He could see them again, Robbie and his mother, standing by the faded maroon LTD in the last of the light, their faces reflecting an orange tint from the Jersey side. Lois wore blue jeans, gray tennis shoes, and a sleeveless blouse—something pink, he remembered. He saw again the fear in her eyes, the awful weight of stress and uncertainty.
“Give it, Joe. Now.”
He remembered the bullheaded, frustrated feeling of losing control over his favorite thing, especially after the miracle of finding it on the highway. Still, there had been security in it. That’s what mothers provided. The card wasn’t, for the time being, his to finger and twirl, but it wouldn’t disappear either. His mother had it, and it was safe, away from his brother, away from the elements, away from the city. It would warm in her back pocket for a few hours. He just needed to remind her it was there before she put the jeans in the wash, wherever they ended up.
For a few seconds he was sure that he was going to cry—just let his hands fall into his lap, let the tears fall between his tie and his shoes. Then the grip of fear snapped him out of it. His mother’s body had turned up on a beach near his home. There was sand in some shoes he had no memory of wearing on a night he had no memory of passing.
And now a simple case file had regurgitated a bittersweet piece of his childhood.
He dug back through the accordion file. That particular one was filled with older records on Evan Bolds, from his dismal performances in failing New York City schools in the ’70s to the bloody elevator case in 1983. There was nothing else of Joe’s in there, no other legal papers or personal stuff. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he had dumped the contents onto the dining room table one night. It was a common habit when he was working from home: spreading out what he was focused on and pushing other things, like mail and canceled checks, aside. If that was the case, then maybe the baseball card had been swept back in? Okay, but that said nothing about how he had gotten it in the first place.
Did she give it to me somehow? Is that why I recognized her in the morgue? She approached me, maybe, when I was bombed out of my mind, and now I don’t—
“Or did I find it on her?” he asked out loud. His eyes shot over to the closed door of his office. It was late July—the place was mostly empty—but still his heart thundered in his ears. He swallowed hard.
No, no, no. I didn’t.
You can’t remember!
Memory was impossible if he truly had been blacked out during some encounter with Lois. The darker truth was that Joe didn’t understand what was happening to him at all.
Lois, he thought. His supple mind, having been on a quickening treadmill of tasks, subtasks, and ideas, now ground to a halt. You’re going to need to understand her—and what became of her.
He felt cruel for lacking the slightest interest in doing so before this miserable afternoon. He was an attorney, an ostensible seeker of the truth. As a prosecutor, he had access to all kinds of investigatory knowhow and resources. Why the hell wouldn’t he want to know what happened to his mother after forty years and such a dreadful end?